“You should know that this may lead to your death.” That was the menacing response from Mikhail Mamiashvili, leader of Russia’s Greco-Roman wrestling team at the 2004 Athens Olympics, when Pelle Svensson, Swedish head of the sport’s disciplinary committee, reprimanded him, saying it was illegal to keep signalling to the referee, in the final of the 84kg division. The Russian wrestler Aleksey Mishin still won gold, defeating Sweden’s Ara Abrahamian who did not take the outcome well, posting on his homepage: “The final ended 1-1 which means you lose if your opponent is Russian.” Svensson wasn’t assassinated but did find evidence to suggest that Mishin’s triumph was facilitated by a $1m bribe to the Romanian referee.

That was not quite how Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat semi-officially known as the ‘father of the modern Olympics’, had envisaged these games developing. His much-quoted ideal that “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered, but too have fought well” has, over the past 32 Olympics, been sullied by one, more or all of the following: corruption, drugs, and politics. A more accurate mission statement for the modern games might be George Orwell’s remark that “Sport is war, minus the shooting” (although, as he really ought to have known, shooting has been a regular Olympic event since 1896).

It didn’t take long for Coubertin’s lofty vision to go awry. At the 1904 St Louis Games, the marathon, the event revived specifically because it embodied the noble spirit of the ancient Greek Olympics, was disrupted by wild dogs (who chased one runner a mile off course), cars (one of which gave an American runner a lift for 11 miles), and the organiser James Sullivan’s decision to use the race as a scientific experiment in ‘purposeful dehydration’ by permitting only two water stops along the 25-mile course. When America’s Thomas Hicks was seven miles from the finish, he was so exhausted his crew gave him a concoction of egg whites and strychnine, possibly the first recorded use of drugs at the Olympics (albeit a popular, and legal, stimulant at the time). He went on to win the event, despite hallucinating, losing eight pounds in weight, consuming more strychnine and French brandy, and being carried over the line by his trainers. 

This was pretty much the exact opposite of what Coubertin had intended. And yet, as this scandalous countdown shows – they’re ranked in order of the Olympian depths they plumbed – there was so much more malpractice, malfeasance and malice to come.

Robbery, revolution, and retribution
Rio 2016

Even before Irish fighter Michael Conlan, the reigning world and European bantamweight champion, left Dublin he had heard rumours that he would be robbed in Rio. In the Olympic village, there was talk that some people in the tournament knew what results to expect. 

In the quarter-final, Conlan faced Russia’s Vladimir Nikitin. Before the fight had even started the Irishman was warned by Algerian referee Kheira Sidi Yakoub, the first woman official to be given a five-star rating from the AIBA, sport’s governing body, to keep his head up. Although suspicious, he redoubled his efforts, dominating Nikitin in the first round and sat down, at the bell, confident he had won it. To his shock – and you can see the outrage on his face in the footage – he gets word that the judges have given the round to his opponent.  “I knew then,” he said later, “it was over.” 

Even the judges agreed that Conlan won the second round – although he received another strange warning from the referee after one (perfectly legal) punch stopped the Russian in his tracks. The third was not as one-sided but most journalists and pundits assumed the Irishman was through to the semi-final and guaranteed an Olympic medal. When Nikitin was declared the winner, the crowd booed in outrage and Conlan stayed in the ring to tell the judges what he thought of them, finishing his tirade by raising his middle finger at them. Afterwards, his anger still raw, he described the AIBA as “cheating bastards”. The outcome proved a Pyrrhic victory for Nikitin who was left so badly hurt after the fight he had to withdraw from the semi-final.

When it comes to other offences to be taken into consideration Olympic boxing’s rap sheet shames Al Capone. One of the most flagrant injustices occurred in Seoul in 1988 when American light middleweight Roy Jones Jr was judged to have lost the final to South Korea’s Park Si-Hun, despite landing 86 punches to his opponent’s 32. Yet there was something about the Rio scandal – possibly the sense that corruption had become systemic (in one fight, for which a $250,000 bribe had allegedly been offered, all five judges had scored each round identically) – and the victim’s blunt reaction, which was short and dramatic enough to be widely shared online, that cut through the media clutter. It transpired that Conlan’s defeat was one of several fights – estimates vary from seven to 11 – in which officials had colluded to manipulate the outcome. The other notable results under suspicion included two men’s finals: heavyweight and superheavyweight (in which Great Britain’s Joe Joyce was unjustly denied gold).

Even executives at Olympic broadcaster NBC, rumoured to have stopped showing amateur fights live due to concerns about match-fixing, must have been taken aback when a report by Richard Maclaren, the Canadian lawyer who had uncovered systemic doping in Russian sport, suggested that the conspiracy was encouraged, and very likely orchestrated by AIBA president Wu Ching-Kuo and executive director Karim Bouzidi. A hand-picked team of five-star referees and judges – all of whom were reassigned and/or suspended during the Rio tournament – used hand signals and verbal instructions to manipulate results, often in favour of post-Soviet countries, some of which had made large ‘investment loans’ to the governing body. Incorruptible officials were marginalised. Wu was later banned from the sport for life.

All this was too much even for the traditionally lenient IOC which sacked the AIBA as tournament organisers for Tokyo (a decision that still applies in Paris) and banned all 36 officials at Rio from involvement in future tournaments. As this was probably the biggest match-fixing scandal in Olympic history, it is a minor miracle that the sport remains on the roster. (Insiders say it was a very close call.) In the genre of revolutionary manifestos, Conlan’s one-finger salute to the officials must count as one of the most succinct, eloquent and effective. 

Hoop nightmares
Munich, 1972

“Article IX: I devise and bequeath at my death that my wife Rita and children Jill and Bryan and their descendants never accept a silver medal from the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany.” That clause, in the last will and testament of Kenneth Davis, captain of the US basketball team that lost the 1972 final to the USSR by one point, in the most controversial circumstances, reveals how long – and how deeply – that outcome hurt.

The Americans had lost an Olympic final during which the last three seconds were replayed three times – and which, at one point, they were deemed to have won – and ended so contentiously that Renato Righetto, the Brazilian head referee, initially refused to sign the scoresheet. Disillusioned and distraught – one player said it “ruined my faith in mankind” – refused to collect their silver medals. The IOC has invited the team to accept the medals, thereby implicitly recognising a result they regard as illegitimate, but the offer comes with a caveat: all 12 players had to accept. That can’t happen now unless Davis, who is 75, changes his mind or his will.

Some aspects of the 1972 final are beyond dispute. The US had a perfect Olympic record going into the match, winning 63 games and losing none, but their young team missed some stars, notably future NBA champion Bill Walton. The Soviets fielded one of their most experienced teams and were the better team for most of the match – they led by ten points with ten minutes to go – but also the more brutal. Their eventual match winner Aleksander Belov probably shouldn’t have been on the court, having fouled Jim Brewer so violently that the injured forward couldn’t play on. The USA picked up the pace – of their passing and running and – with six seconds to go, had clawed it back to 48-49. 

And then all hell broke loose. With three seconds left, Doug Collins was awarded two free throws for a bad foul. He sank the first to make it 49-49. As he began his second throw, the horn from the scorers’ table sounded, signifying that someone had requested a time out. As the referees did not stop play, Collins followed through to make it 50-49. A Soviet coach stormed over to the scorers’ table and shouted that his boss, Vladimir Kondrashin had asked for a time out before the second throw, pressing a buzzer which was supposed to flash a light on the scorers’ table.

Kondrashin finally got his time out, with the clock showing one second to go, but, as a Soviet pass went astray, the buzzer sounded. As the Americans celebrated, Dr William Jones, the British secretary-general of the Federation of International Basketball Associations (FIBA), descended from the stands and ordered the judges to reset the clock to show there were still three seconds left, something, he later admitted, he had no legal authority to do. When play resumed, the Americans were still reeling from having victory snatched away. Their tall centre Tom McMillen was then ordered by Bulgarian referee Artenik Arabdjian to back off Ivan Edeshko or be penalised for a technical foul (which would have all but guaranteed defeat). Given plenty of space, Edesheko passed the length of the court for Belov to score. This time, the result stood: the USSR 51, USA 50. Judges rejected America’s impassioned appeal by a 3-2 vote, with three Communist countries, Cuba, Hungary, and Poland backing the USSR.

To be fair to the Soviets, Kondrashin was a shrewd, vastly experienced coach who, even in the heat of such a moment, was unlikely to make a mistake over a time out. To be fair to the scorers, they were not aware of the USSR’s request, so it is quite possible their light didn’t work. (The footage is inconclusive.) To be fair to the Americans, Righetto, the Brazilian head referee, supported their appeal, declaring that the “Soviet victory was completely irregular and outside the rules of basketball”. Coincidentally or not, the official, who had initially refused the FIBA chief’s order to reset the clock, never refereed another international basketball game.

Infuriating the Furrier
Berlin, 1936

Young Germans, Adolf Hitler once declared, were to be “firm as steel, tough as leather and as quick as greyhounds”. Those were the virtues he expected his country to showcase at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Given that greyhounds can run at 45mph, this was always going to be a tall order. To make matters worse for the Nazis, the only person who ran vaguely like a greyhound (at speeds of around 21mph) was the Afro-American athlete Jesse Owens who won four gold medals – in the 100m, 200m, 4 x 100 relay and long jump. 

In the 100m final, Owens had taken just 30m to emerge as the clear winner. Forty metres later, his fellow Afro-American Ralph Metcalfe broke free to secure silver. German sprinter Erich Borchmeyer, who had won silver in Los Angeles in 1932, came in fifth. The result, which spectacularly disproved Nazi theories about Aryan supremacy – and was cheered by a significant proportion of the crowd in the Olympiastadion – was almost more than the German Chancellor could bear. When advised by Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach that the sprinter was a “friendly and educated man” whose achievement should, in the great sporting tradition, be recognised by the hosts, the Fuhrer shouted back: “Do you really think I allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with him?” Hitler had already stopped personally congratulating medallists when the IOC informed that he couldn’t just commend German victors and he was hardly likely to make an exception in this case. The other world leader who wouldn’t allow himself to be photographed shaking hands with a black man, oddly enough, was American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who didn’t meet Owens on the athlete’s return, and couldn’t even be bothered to send a congratulatory telegram.

Four days after that historic 100m race, the Nazi leader, who had never attended a football game in his life, agreed to watch Germany play Norway in the quarter-finals. Hitler understood the sport’s appeal to the masses and decided to attend after a local mayor had blithely assured him “the team will win gold”. (They were joint favourites with Great Britain.) What he, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, Luftwaffe boss Hermann Göring and deputy Nazi leader Rudolf Hess didn’t know, as they joined 55,000 fervent fans to show their support in Berlin’s Poststadion, was that Felix Linnemann, head of the Reich Department of Football, had decided to rest some of Germany’s better players for tougher matches to come. Unfortunately for Linnemann, there were no more games to come. 

Norway went 1-0 up after six minutes. As Goebbels noted anxiously in his diary: “The Fuhrer is very agitated, I’m almost unable to control myself, a dramatic, nerve-racking fight”. After surviving relentless pressure, the unfancied Norwegians counterattacked to make it 2-0, with five minutes to go. The founder of the Third Reich had seen enough, storming out of the stadium with his entourage. Hitler took this as such a personal affront that he never watched another football match. 

Men in black
Mexico City, 1968

Afro-American 200m sprinter Tommie Smith was still officially the fastest man in the world in 1972, but instead of preparing to defend his Olympic title – and world record – in Munich, he was earning a crust by teaching athletics to schoolchildren in Wakefield, Yorkshire.

The gesture that led to this spectacular fall from grace was a raised right fist, a symbol of the Black Power movement, on the podium in Mexico City as The Star Spangled Banner was played. Smith had triumphed in the 200m, breaking his own world record with a time of 19.83 minutes. His fellow Afro-American, bronze medallist John Carlos, joined Smith in that salute, raising his left hand to symbolise black unity. Their protest was carefully considered: both athletes wore socks but no shoes, (alluding to the poverty endured by Afro-Americans) and black scarves (showcasing racial pride). Carlos’s bead necklace was an oblique protest against the practice of lynching.

Their outrage was understandable. In the run up to the Mexico City games, civil rights leader Martin Luther King had been assassinated, provoking race riots across America. Yet the sprinters paid a high price for their stand, being vilified, abused and receiving death threats. One (white) American sportscaster Brent Musburger condemned them as “black-skinned stormtroopers” and, more damagingly, they were censured by the IOC, suspended from America’s Olympic team and sent home. Even so, Smith always maintained the gesture was worth the sacrifice: “The black athlete knows that the body could be a springboard to success. Because in track and field, nobody can say you are no good. The only person who can ever say that is the clock.” Asked by the BBC if he had any doubts about what he had done, the 1968 gold medallist said: “The only regret is that it was necessary.”

The character who often gets overlooked in this sorry saga is Australian silver medallist Peter Norman. Given advance warning by his fellow medallists, he demonstrated his support by wearing the badge of the recently formed Olympic Project for Human Rights group. This didn’t go down too well back home and, like Smith, he was not chosen to represent his country at the next Olympics. 

When Norman died of a heart attack in October 2006, at the age of 64, Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral. Their participation was a paradoxical, yet deeply moving affirmation of the authentic Olympic spirit. As Carlos recalled: “When I told him of our plans, I expected to see fear. I didn’t. I saw love.”

Ain't that a kick in the head?
Beijing, 2008

If sports fans can agree on anything, it is surely that kicking a referee in the face is a flagrant contradiction of Olympic values. Yet according to Fidel Castro, the dictator, golfer and occasional sports journalist, this attack, by Cuban taekwondo star Ángel Matos in the bronze medal match at the Beijing Games, was a legitimate, revolutionary act of defiance. 

A past Olympic champion in the 80-kilogram division, Matos was 3-2 up against Kazakhstan’s Arman Chilmanov when he injured his foot – possibly breaking a toe – and requested a kyeshi, a one-minute medical timeout. After 40 seconds, Swedish referee Chakir Chelbat gave both men the requisite time warning but, when the minute had elapsed, the Cuban had still not returned to the centre of the ring which meant, according to the rules, that he had forfeited the match. 

In a case of what you can literally call kicking the messenger, Matos struck Chelbat with such force that the official reportedly needed stitches in his lips. The Cuban then proceeded to kick another referee and spit on the ring before he and his defiant coach Leudis Gonzalez were escorted out by security guards. A few minutes later, the taekwondo federation announced that Matos would be banned for life for this “insult to the Olympic vision and insult to mankind” (which was stretching it a bit).

In Havana, Castro wrote an article in a government newspaper protesting against this verdict, arguing that the taekwondo athlete had been unable to contain himself because “they tried to buy his own coach” and, failing that, had bribed the referees instead. After becoming a gym trainer in Havana, Matos apologised for his conduct but still maintained that the referee was wrong. 

Like all the great conspiracy theorists, Castro never disclosed exactly who ‘they’ were. (It was unlikely to be the usual ‘running dogs of imperialism’ with China hosting.) That said, he did add “I do not have to remain silent in the face of [the Olympic] mafia” which is the kind of claim you can only make after you have comprehensively defeated the American mafia.

Blood in the water
Melbourne, 1956

After being punched in the eye, Hungarian water polo star Ervin Zádor saw so many stars that he didn’t realise just how much blood he was losing until he put his hand to his face. With a minute left in the 1956 Olympic semi-final against the Soviet Union, Zádor, who had scored twice as Hungary romped to a 4-0 lead, left the pool with blood pouring from his head. As spectators jumped the barrier to confront the Soviet bench and Melbourne police piled in to avoid a riot, officials ended the match. All Zádor could think, he said later, was: “Oh my God, I won’t be able to play the next game.”

Only a month before the match, the Hungarian uprising in Budapest had been crushed by Soviet (mainly Russian) troops. Zádor and his team-mates only discovered the full grisly details of the invasion when an English speaker in the squad bought a newspaper in Melbourne and told colleagues that 5,000 of their compatriots had been killed in the repression. Hungary’s water polo team soon agreed on a simple strategy to exact revenge: they would insult the Russians in their own language.

As Zádor explained: “From the age of ten, I took more Russian than Hungarian so by the time I was 21, I knew enough Russian to do anything. It was verbal on our end, hoping they’d react physically. We figured, if they get angry, they’ll start to fight, and if they fight, they won’t play well.” Keen to up the ante, Hungary’s captain Dezso Gyarmati threw a punch early on. Infuriated by such jibes as “You dirty bastards, you come over and bomb our country”, three Russians were sent out of the pool by the referee. Valentin Prokopov, probably also aggravated by his failure to score in the entire tournament, used a time out to punch Zádor in the eye with such force that eight stitches were required. The incident fuelled false rumours that the pool had turned red, leading the media to call this the “blood in the water” match. Zádor was sidelined for the final, in which Hungary beat Yugoslavia 2-1. 

Roughly half of Hungary’s Olympic squad defected after the games, including Zádor who, given that he was only 21, effectively sacrificed his career by doing so. (Given the standard of water polo in America in the 1950s, his defection was akin to Lionel Messi joining Newport County.) Yet the conflicts in Budapest and Melbourne rewrote Olympic history. Zádor eventually became a swimming coach. One of his proteges was the American swimmer Mark Spitz, who had Hungarian, Jewish and Russian roots, won seven gold medals – and set seven world records – at the games in Munich.

The hand that rocked the final
London 1908

Rules are rules but in 1908 they differed according to where in the sporting world you were competing. America’s truculent Olympic delegation discovered this soon after their arrival in London, disputing the regulations for the pole vault and 1,500m and complaining that, in the tug of war event, while their athletes wore track shoes, the British team had steel-rimmed boots. These unedifying squabbles were eclipsed by the furious controversy that swirled around the 400m men’s final in which Scottish runner Wyndham Halswelle became the first and only Olympian to win the gold medal in a walkover.

An accomplished, serial record-breaking runner, Halswelle faced three American sprinters in the final at White City stadium: John Carpenter, William Robbins and John Taylor. In accordance with the custom of the time, athletes were not assigned lanes at the time and Robbins quickly began jockeying to try and knock the other runners off their stride. Such manoeuvring was perfectly legal in America but not in London, where the British Amateur Athletics Association’s regulations governed track and field events. Coming out of the final bend, Carpenter and Halswelle were virtually level until the American ran wide to block the Scot and raised his right hand to ensure he could not be passed. He won the race in a time of 47.8 seconds.

Before the Americans could celebrate, a British umpire with the marvellous moniker of Roscoe Badger signalled to the judges that, given Carpenter’s obstruction, the race was null and void. The American protested his innocence basically arguing, in a now time-honoured defence, “I never touched him guv”. Halswelle didn’t agree, complaining: “He entirely stopped me running”. After a 30-minute row between British and American officials, the judges disqualified Carpenter and decided the final must be rerun.  

Incensed American officials barred their other finalists, Robbins and Taylor, from competing in the rerun and so, on July 25, 1908, Halswelle ran the final on his own. This surreal experience obviously affected his performance: his winning time of 50.0 seconds was significantly slower than his Olympic record run of 48.4 seconds in the semi-final.

As a result of all this turmoil, lanes were subsequently introduced for the 400m and, after the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the International Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) was founded to establish consistent and universal rules for every track and field event.

Disillusioned, Halswelle retired from athletics a few months later. An officer in the Highland Light Infantry, Halswelle was killed by a sniper while trying to rescue an injured colleague at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on March 31, 1915. He was 32.

A game of hit and miss
Montreal, 1976

In July 1976, Boris Onischenko was one of the leading lights in a Soviet modern pentathlon team expected to win Olympic gold in Montreal. Two months later, after a rollicking from the USSR’s dozy general secretary Leonid Brezhnev, the 38-year-old athlete was fined, sacked from the Red Army, stripped of all sporting honours and probably counted himself lucky to get a job as a taxi driver in Kyiv.

Onischenko’s crime was to compete in the fencing event with a blade incorporating, in its leather-covered handle, a complex wiring system which, when a particular pad was pressed, informed the sensors a hit had been scored. The obvious flaw in this scheme was that, the more games he played, the more likely it was that opponents, officials and coaches would notice that the system wasn’t working properly. When Great Britain’s Jim Fox evaded a lunge from Onischenko he was stupefied to see the sensors registering a hit, prompting his team to launch an official complaint. An inquiry found that the Russian had cheated – one official said, “it was like catching someone with a smoking gun standing over a dead body” – and ‘Dishonischenko’, as the Western media soon branded him, was banned. He apologised personally to Fox, admitting “I know I didn’t hit you”. 

Being much older than his Soviet team-mates, Onischenko may have acquiesced to such skulduggery because he felt under extra pressure to win. He certainly didn’t design the wired up blade (which he stubbornly maintained wasn’t his) but it was much easier for the Soviet authorities to scapegoat him than admit their complicity in such an elaborately engineered fraud. His disqualification left the USSR with too few athletes to finish the team event, which they had won in 1964 and 1972. Great Britain took full advantage, coming back from eighth to win gold. Fox bore his disgraced rival no ill-will, saying of Onischenko: “Make no mistake, he’s a great fencer”. The team event was discontinued after the 1992 Olympics.

Madness, murder and Margaret Thatcher
Moscow, 1980

In the build up to the Moscow Olympics, Scottish sprinter Allan Wells received several missives from 10 Downing Street urging him to boycott the games, which would take place roughly eight months after the Soviet Union’s preposterous invasion of Afghanistan. One of these letters included a photograph of a young girl, sprawled dead on the ground with her doll. Despite this gruesome image, the Scot remained determined to compete. As he put it, “A Russian soldier is hardly likely to say ‘Oh, Allan Wells isn’t coming, I’m not going to shoot somebody’”.

Several countries – encouraged by American president Jimmy Carter – had already decided to boycott the event and prime minister Margaret Thatcher was desperately keen for Great Britain to follow suit. As the Iron Lady had no legal authority to force the British Olympic Association to comply, she made the case for a boycott to the public and politicians. Her campaign came unstuck in the House of Commons when Labour’s former sports minister Denis Howell asked why the government expected athletes to take a stand against Soviet military might when it had already confirmed that it would continue offering export guarantees to British companies selling to Russia. As one MP said: “We could smell the humbug.”

Starting out in the long jump event, Wells hadn’t taken sprinting that seriously until 1976, explaining, only half-jokingly, that he was afraid of being beaten by five men at once. Belatedly realising he had a gift for running, he put himself through a prolonged and punitive training regime; testament, he said later, not to his dedication but to “madness, just about”. 

His preparations for Moscow were, paradoxically, helped by a back injury which left him unable to train. Arriving in Russia, he agreed to run six trials so that he, and his wife (and effectively coach) champion sprinter Margot, could decide whether he was in any fit state to compete. To their mutual surprise, the mental and physical rest had done him good. He was running better than ever, and continued to do so as he won the 100m final, beating Cuba’s Silvio Leonard in what was virtually a photo-finish. He had set a new British record – 10.11 seconds – in the semi. At the age of 28 years and 83 days, he was the oldest 100m champion (a distinction since taken by 32-year-old Linford Christie in Barcelona).

For Wells, speed was all about feeling relaxed. To get that feeling – and maintain it – he took two just books to Moscow: a history of the Nuremberg Trials and forensic pathologist Keith Simpson’s autobiography Forty Years of Murder.

The hunger games
Athens, 2004

What do you do when you are drawn against an opponent representing a country your government does not officially recognise? At the Athens Games In 2004, Iranian judoka Arash Miresmaeili came up with an ingenious solution to this thorny problem. Chosen to face Israel’s Ehud Vaks in the first round, he ate so much food the night before the bout that he weighed in at 2kg over the 66kg limit and was disqualified. The result perplexed officials until the Iranian reportedly declared: “Although I have trained for months and am in good shape, I refused to fight my Israeli opponent to sympathise with the suffering of the Palestinian people and I am not upset at all about the decision I have made.”  

Miresmaeili may have been gilding the lily when he used the phrase “the decision I have made.” The day after the incident a spokeswoman for Iran’s National Olympic Committee said: “This is a general policy of our country, to refrain from competing against athletes of the Zionist regime and Arash Miresmaeili has observed this policy.” Asked if the athlete had withdrawn of his own volition, the spokeswoman simply said: “No.”

This represented a significant sacrifice for Miresmaeili who, as the reigning world champion, was the clear favourite to win in Athens. On Friday August 13, he had the honour of being Iran’s flag bearer in the opening ceremony in the Olympic Stadium. The following Thursday, after his epic binge, his Olympic campaign was over.

All that was left was for the International Judo Federation to decide whether withdrawing on political grounds, a breach of its own rules and Olympic regulations, warranted a ban for him – and the entire Iranian team. It seemed an open and shut case. There was the judoka’s own widely quoted statement, the announcement by Iran’s Olympic Committee, backed up the country’s president Mohammad Khatami who declared that the athlete’s sacrifice would be “recorded in the history of Iranian glories.” If a smoking gun was needed, the fact that two Iranians had withdrawn rather than face Israeli opponents in the 2001 World Judo Championships surely provided it.

And yet, to the surprise of no one vaguely familiar with the looking glass world of sporting diplomacy, the investigative commission appointed by the International Judo Federation (IJF) decided that neither Miresmaeili – nor Iran – had any case to answer. He told the commission that he had never said anything about sympathising with Palestine’s plight to the media. Neither, according to the head of Iran’s judo federation, who was involved in the hearing, had he deliberately planned to avoid the contest (even though this was in line with government policy). All this left the commission with the simple, but ludicrous explanation that, on the night before his opening contest in an event for which he had trained hard for several months and was widely expected to win, Miresmaeili got so hungry – or stressed – that he overate. Massively.

As you can’t be punished for being overweight, the verdict left the Iranian judoka, who was still only 23, free to resume his career. In 2008, he won the Asian Championships but was knocked out in the round of 16 in Beijing. The IJF’s leniency did not change Iran’s policy one iota. In 2019, the federation banned the country from the sport for four years after Iranian judoka Saeid Mollaei had pulled out of the world championships rather than face an Israeli opponent. The president of Iran’s Judo Federation, on whose watch those orders were given, was none other than Arash Miresmaeili.